When I was in college, one of my photography instructors chose a book (Light and Lens by Robert Hirsch) that seemed inconsequential at the time, but recently I picked it up again to give it a second glance. In the beginning (seriously, not even twenty pages in), Hirsch discusses the importance of photography. He enumerates how photography is often used to store important memories, enabling people to become sentimentally attached to images. While I agree with Hirsch (sentimentality and memory keeping is an important aspect of photography), I believe that there is much more to photography than that.
Photography can inspire you, it can allow the truth to be shown to you, and it can allow people to come to realizations they wouldn’t have been able to in other ways. Photographs can provide inspiration based on the context of the memory that it brings back or based on the context of the photograph itself. This can be seen every day in news media. People are moved by stories that are played on news outlets for a very simple reason: the visual representation of emotions. While it may be done in certain instances to garner higher ratings, the main reason to include visual images of war, disease, famine, etc. is to elicit an emotional response from the audience. Part of this emotional response is to inspire people to action. To find an example, we have to look no further than the recent anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. When Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast ten years ago, the images that were being broadcast all over the country inspired a nation to come to the aid of our fellow citizens in their darkest hours of need. Ten years later, these images still hold the powerful emotions that inspired a nation to action.
Photography can show us the truth. Not only can we look at news coverage and argue that the truth is being shown to people, but in a more literal sense, the authorities use photographic imaging in order to help them uncover the truth. Part of the protocol for investigators is to not only sketch out a crime scene and take eyewitness testimony if it’s available, but they also photograph crime scenes. Not only does this help them visually represent the scene of the crime to a potential jury, but it also helps them to be able to go back in time to the original crime scene and examine it more thoroughly in order to find details that could be of vital importance that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed. If photographic truth is enough for criminal investigations, it is certainly enough for me.
Without photography: we wouldn’t be able to recall our childhoods with such clarity, we wouldn’t be able to inspire millions in a call to action, we wouldn’t be able to discover the whole truth of a situation, in short, we wouldn’t have a representation of anything that was simultaneously accurate and emotional. Think about how many photographic images you see everyday. Without the vital purpose that photography fulfills, the world would be a very different place. When you piece together each individual use of photography, it is quite clear that its purpose extends beyond that of bringing back fondness and nostalgia. Photographs are quite literally a world into another place, another time, or another state of mind. In short, photographs have changed this amazing world.
– Hazel
Photo © 2015 Hazel Arroyo
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